


a song for winter

by elliebell (Naladot)



Category: Day6 (Band), Wonder Girls
Genre: Adulthood, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Bands, Character Study, Conversations, Crushes, Day6 Ensemble, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Passing reference to past eating disorder, Personal Growth, Slice of Life, Social Anxiety, Some Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 05:54:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16423676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/elliebell
Summary: Lim and Jae become friends over a series of electricity outages, and other issues with their crappy apartment building. Adulthood isn't easy, and sometimes, you just need someone to sit with you and listen. Slice-of-Life friendship AU.





	a song for winter

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very self-indulgent slice-of-life fic inspired by watching that JaeSix vid with Lim too many times. I literally just wanted to write a heartwarming story about them being friends, and here we are, 6500 words later :)

* * *

 

 

 

The electricity goes out at 6:31 PM, when the sun has disappeared beneath the horizon and left nothing but a thin blue haze embracing the city. Lim throws the chopsticks she’s holding into the sink and glares at the gooey mass of half-cooked eggs in the frying pan. If this stupid apartment came with a gas stove like she’d wanted—well, not that it matters. The fact of the matter is she’s got an electric hot plate and it’s December and, most importantly, the battery of her phone is on 22%.

 

Groaning, she grabs her keys and rushes out the door, slinging a coat over her shoulders as the door slams behind her.

 

She tests the lights in her own stairwell—nothing. She tests the lights in the stairwell below her—nada. She tests the lights in the stairwell on the ground floor—沒有。If the rent weren’t so cheap, she’d call up her lawyer unnie and see if they could get the landlord written up for some sort of negligence violation. Failure to meet basic building codes. Whatever it might be called.

 

She slams open the building door, intending to get a look at the outdoor lights (it could be a city issue, though more than likely it’s the useless landlord), but it bounces back on something solid.

 

“ _Ouch!_ ” the solid thing cries out.

 

Lim keels back and discovers it’s her second-floor neighbor, Jae, rubbing his guitar case like it’s a particularly fussy baby.

 

“How dare you bully my child like this!” he says, pulling the guitar away from her.

 

Lim frowns. “I thought you said that ‘she’ was your lover.”

 

“It’s complicated,” Jae returns. “People don’t understand human-instrument relationships.”

 

“Well,” Lim shrugs, and gives him a look. “It’s an inanimate object.”

 

“I forgive you your prejudice, because it’s based in ignorance,” Jae says solemnly. “Why are you throwing doors around, anyway?”

 

“Electricity’s out.”

 

“Again?” Jae laughs. “But I pay so little money for this place.”

 

“And split five ways, too,” Lim points out.

 

“I know!” Jae grins. “Do you wanna call Mr. Kwon, or shall I do the honors?”

 

“We could wait for the fourth floor auntie to do it.”

 

“Oh, good idea. Her phone calls are like master classes in sick burns.”

 

Lim laughs, bites at her lip, and thinks about going up to her freezing apartment with her half-cooked eggs and almost-dead phone. Of the five guys living on the second floor, Jae is the only one she talks with semi-regularly, brief conversations exchanged in mixed English and Korean whenever they find themselves in the stairwell at the same time. He’s reliably friendly, gentle, and when his singing floats up from his window and into her apartment, she always stops to listen.

 

“Do you want to come up to my apartment?” she asks, then winces. “Not like—I just mean—”

 

“If you’re propositioning me with the opportunity for better acoustics to eavesdrop on Fourth Floor Auntie chewing out the landlord,” Jae says, “Then I accept.” He says it quickly, almost over-eager to prove that he didn’t get any untoward ideas from her question. Lim relaxes, then gestures up the stairs.

 

“This way.”

 

He follows her up the stairs, ducking briefly into his apartment to drop off his things (“Mery needs her nap. She’s on a very systemic schedule.” “Are you—sure systemic is the word you want here?” “Why are you questioning my Inglesias prowess?” “Not—entirely sure your Spanish is right either.”)

 

She feels shy, very briefly, when she opens the door to her apartment. There’s just not that much to it. Lim had taken this place out of necessity; for all the villas and penthouses she posts to her vision board, she isn’t making much money working part-time while she gets her master’s degree in translation. And then she is looking at freelance, most likely, until she can build up a solid portfolio—at any rate, her money has a lot of places to go besides decorations. So the place looks cold and bare, the only color in the whole place a pink blanket her mom mailed from Hong Kong.

 

“It’s nice,” Jae says.

 

“Shut up.” She bites her lip after she says it, realizing suddenly that it sounded too sharp.

 

But he doesn’t seem to notice. “No, I mean it,” he says, looking down at her with a smile. “It looks like a girl lives here.”

 

Lim rolls her eyes. “Funny, since I’m a woman.”

 

Jae chuckles and inclines his head in agreement, then follows her into the kitchen, where she dumps out the eggs by the last vestiges of sunlight filtering through the window, and starts pulling candles out of the cabinets.

 

“I end up with these in random places,” she explains, “Because every time the electricity goes, I need light in weird spots—can you hand me that one, up there?”

 

“Why did you need a candle on top of your kitchen cabinets?”

 

“Spider.”

 

“Valid.”

 

“I think the lighter is on top of the television, if you wouldn’t mind grabbing it.”

 

Jae obediently returns to the living room, while Lim arranges the candles on the kitchen counter. It will smell like The Face Shop in here by the time the electricity comes back on. Jae comes back and begins lighting the candles, which Lim moves one by one across the apartment, until the room is filled with enough glow to see by as the twilight disappears.

 

“Nice,” Jae says with his hands in his pockets, surveying the arrangement.

 

Lim pauses. She never does think these things through, and here she’s brought her odd male neighbor into her apartment and gone and lit it up in the most romantic way she could. Sad thing is, she’d never manage anything like this with a guy she actually wanted to seduce. She waits for Jae to say something.

 

“Looks like we’re about to summon a demon or something.”

 

Thrown off guard, Lim laughs loudly. “Don’t joke about stuff like that!”

 

“I’m not joking, I’m observing,” Jae says. “Like all I need to do is—” He pulls his hoodie over his head, down low enough to cover his eyes. “ _Careless, careless, shoot anonymous, anonymous—”_

 

“Oh my god.” Shaking her head, Lim pulls two thick blankets out of their designated basket and hands Jae one before flopping onto the couch. “I know one of them.”

 

“One of the EXO guys?”

 

“Yeah. Well, ex-EXO.”

 

Jae flops down beside her and pulls his blanket up to his neck. “Wow. That’s how you get murdered, isn’t it? By their fans?”

 

Lim laughs again. “So far, I’ve been okay.”

 

“How’d you meet an idol?”

 

“My friend Jia used to be a trainee,” she explains, smoothing her hand over the soft wool. “And all the Chinese trainees were friends, so I met Zitao a few times. But it didn’t pan out for Jia. She went back to China and got a regular job.”

 

“Too bad.”

 

“Yeah.” Lim looks around at the candles. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like, that sort of career. Like—would I be more confident in my life choices, or whatever, if I was that successful.”

 

Jae shrugs, candlelight reflected in his glasses. “There are no guarantees of success.”

 

Lim takes a good look at him, maybe for the first time. She’s always regarded him as her goofy neighbor, but he’s strangely serious now, with his face all caught up in shadows and golden light. “What do you do? I just realized I’ve never asked.”

 

He looks over and smiles. “That’s okay. I—well, me and the guys, _we’re_ —a band. We’re good, too.”

 

“I’ve heard you,” Lim says. “You’re great. I just didn’t realize you were professionals.”

 

“Not yet,” Jae leans his head back on the couch. “Someday, though. Someday real soon.”

 

They sit in silence for a moment. It’s not comfortable, but it’s not _un_ comfortable. More just, the strange timbre of letting a stranger into your apartment and curling up together on the couch, almost too intimate an act to share with an acquaintance. Lim considers telling him he’s free to leave, but then he turns to her again.

 

“Not to be weird, but—”

 

“You just guaranteed the rest is going to be weird.”

 

“Fair. Okay but, seriously. This _is_ weird, but I’m gonna ask because—I dunno. Anyway. Sometimes from my room I can hear you like—rehearsing, I guess? It sounds like you’re on a newscast or something.”

 

Lim blushes and looks away. She never guessed the sound would filter downstairs, though she should have assumed it would, considering she hears every word Fourth Floor Auntie yells into the phone every morning.

 

“Yeah,” Lim says. “It’s sort of my goal to be on television and do translation and that sort of thing.”

 

“That’s cool.”

 

She looks back and Jae and he’s smiling.

 

“For real,” he says.

 

She hasn’t actually articulated that before now. She usually pretends she’ll do translation for businesses, maybe books if she’s lucky. Television is a far-away goal, some place for idols and maybe unnies like Jia, but nowhere for her.

 

“Thanks,” she says softly.

 

At that moment, Fourth Floor Auntie starts screaming.

 

“Finally!” Jae calls in the direction of the ceiling. “Man you really _can_ hear so much better up here! It’s like a front row seat!”

 

Lim laughs and they both turn their eyes up to the ceiling. As they listen to their landlord get the most scathing dressing-down of anyone’s life, Lim wonders if today, she might have made a friend.

  
  
  


 

Her question—did she make a friend—gets answered in subsequent days by Jae’s frequent reappearances at her apartment door.

 

The first time, he knocks and asks, “Hey are your windows leaking? Because ours are literal waterfalls.”

 

This is how Lim discovers that her windows are, in fact, leaking. She and Jae each place phone calls to the landlord, watching and repeating _hwaiting_ in whispers while the other one attempts to firmly state their complaints like competent adults.

 

The second time, he knocks and, one eye half-closed in a wink of suffering, tells her, “There’s a stray kitten trapped in the stairwell.”

 

“There’s a _what?_ ” Lim cries.

 

The kitten is very gross, very pitiful, and very fast. They spend the better part of an hour chasing it up and down the stairs—they never get close enough to decide whether they want to trap it or chase it out the door—before it finally jumps across the barred stairwell windows and into the next apartment building. They then spend the next half-hour barricading all the windows to their own stairwell with plastic and tape, effectively trapping the kitten in the apartment next door.

 

“Yeah, but they have a responsive and respectable landlord,” Jae points out when Lim questions the ethics of this.

 

The third time, Jae knocks on the door and leans against the doorway. “I’m not gonna lie to you, I’m really bored. Can we just hang out?”

 

Lim rolls her eyes, but grins, and lets him in.

 

Jae roams around her apartment while she cooks, taking advantage of the stable electricity by making a big pot of stew. Jae rubs the back of his neck as he looks around, apparently uncomfortable. Though in all honesty, she’s glad he dropped by. Otherwise, she would have just spent the evening by herself.

 

“What’s this?” Jae asks.

 

She looks over and he’s pointing at her laptop, which she definitely would not have left open if she expected a visitor. On the screen is her most recent Powerpoint, titled _Woo Hyerim: A journey of highs and lows_. Lim’s ears go hot.

 

“I, uh,” she manages to say. “Sometimes make Powerpoint presentations about my life and goals?”

 

Jae nods solemnly. “Sick. Can I see?”

 

“Um.” The spoon in her hand is dripping soup all over the countertop. She sets it down. “I guess so?”

 

He clicks through to the first slide, a picture of her family and a description of her childhood.

 

“It’s kind of stupid,” Lim says, feeling just how stupid it is. Even the font looks uncool from this far away, the kind of font a graphic design student would sneer at, though she’d never figured out what the criteria was. “I’ve just been doing this since I was in high school.”

 

“It’s like,” Jae says, clicking through her high school slides and into college, “I dunno. A visualization tool. If it helps you, then it’s cool.”

 

Lim folds her arms around herself and watches the screen flashing forward. Jae gives each slide its due, reading over the English and Korean text, maybe the Chinese—she has never asked if he knows other languages, too. “Yeah, it helps,” she says. “But maybe it’s too silly.”

 

He stops on the slide about her master’s degree program, the one without any pictures because she hasn’t taken any, and turns to look at her. “Why’s that?”

 

She starts to consider her answer. But before she can form a thought, someone bangs on her front door.

 

“Jae!” calls a voice. “Dude, I need the utilities money!”

 

“Why? The utilities literally do not work!” Jae yells back, apparently very comfortable in her home now. His eyes widen and he gives her an embarrassed, apologetic grin. Laughing, Lim goes and opens the door.

 

It’s the hot one, standing on the other side of her door. She doesn’t even know his name—she knows all the names from talking to Jae, she’s pretty sure, a jumble of names she’s never had the chance to match up with the faces of the other four dudes living downstairs. This one, she just calls the hot one, in her head, to herself.

 

He grins. Lim can’t remember how to move the muscles in her mouth.

 

“Can I come in?” the hot one asks.

 

“Oh. Uh. Sure.”

 

Lim steps back and lets him in. He walks in with his head held high, none of Jae’s uncertain posture.

 

“Thanks for babysitting Jae, by the way,” the hot one says, flashing her another gentle smile.

 

“Oh. He’s not—”

 

“Dude,” Jae cuts in, glaring at the hot one. “You are a guest in this gentlewoman’s home—”

 

“Gentlewoman?” Lim asks, automatically. She doesn’t look to see if the hot one laughed or not.

 

“Is that not a word?” Jae asks.

 

“I have no idea.”

 

“I thought you were getting a master’s in translation.”

 

“I thought when you said you were born in ‘92 you meant _nineteen_ ninety-two, not _eighteen_ ninety-two.”

 

“I thought when you said you were born in ‘92 it would form a bond of solidarity between us, but here you are roasting me anyway.”

 

“Oh,” the hot one cuts in, grinning at her. “Hyerim- _nuna_ to me, then.”

 

Lim freezes. She doesn’t know how to reply to that—first off, he knows her name but she doesn’t know his. Second, he _knows_ her _name_ . Third, he called her _Hyerim_ , her Korean name and not her nickname, which—doesn’t actually mean anything, except he must have learned both names, and made the switch to Korean specifically to call her _nuna_ , which means something for some guys, anyway—

 

“Why do you gotta make stuff weird, Brian?” Jae asks.

 

Brian. Lim commits it to memory, rolling it around on her tongue.

 

“You’re both welcome to eat here, if you want,” Lim says. She looks at them, and they look at each other.

 

Jae rubs the back of his neck. “You don’t know what you just committed yourself to, my friend.”

 

At dinner they both do make a valiant effort to eat reasonable portions. Lim eats one bowl, and some rice, and they both eat two helpings of everything, then sit and pretend like they’re not hungry until Lim offers more, and then pretend to reject her, and then Jae eats another helping and Brian eats two more. For Lim, though, it’s one of the advantages of guy friends, having them around to finish off food that would just go bad otherwise. When she was an upperclassman in college she adopted some freshmen from the dance club, Jaebum and Jinyoung, who had wild appetites and idiotic senses of humor. They still contact her sometimes, though not often, and she misses them. She feels a brief gasp of hope that she might find friends in these two.

 

Brian offers to do the dishes. When he’s at the sink, water running, Jae leans in close enough to whisper.

 

“You okay?” he asks. He nods in the direction of Brian’s back. “Having him here, I mean.”

 

Lim maintains a cool facade. Or hopes she does.

 

“Yeah. No problem.”

 

Jae looks at her for an extended moment, unknown thoughts flitting across his eyes. “Okay,” he says finally, then picks up her bowl and goes to help Brian.

  
  
  


 

A few days later, she’s getting off the subway when she spots Jae’s unmistakable head above the crowd. Shouldering her backpack, she rushes to catch up with him, pulling on his sleeve as she approaches.

 

“Wow, a wandering musician,” she teases.

 

He looks around wildly, makes eye contact, and then grins. “I thought you were one of my stalker fans.”

 

Lim snorts. “Right. How many of those you got?”

 

“Two, actually. Not joking. Cross my heart.”

 

“That sounds—terrifying.”

 

He shudders. “Yup.” He gestures to her backpack as they reach the top of the stairs. “Lemme carry that.”

 

Lim hesitates, scrunching together her eyebrows, but he reaches for the shoulder strap and she lets him. “Chivalrous,” she laughs.

 

He wags a finger in her direction. “Nah, I support full gender equality, my friend. This is purely because I’m bigger and stronger.”

 

“Are you?” She squints at him and pinches his bicep. “I’ll have you know I have a black belt in taekwondo.”

 

His expression changes, a little, but she doesn’t get a good look at him as they push through the turnstiles. Once they’re back in the normal flow of foot traffic again, she looks up and finds his face strangely shadowed.

 

“Same, actually,” he says. He pulls the backpack up higher on his shoulder. “I mean, I know I don’t look like it.”

 

“That’s not what I—” she begins, then stops, because she had pinched his arm after all. She just hadn’t realized it might be a sensitive issue.

 

“Not everyone’s Brian,” he says, exaggerating the name. “Sungjin’s stronger though, actually.”

 

“Which one is Sungjin?”

 

“Buzz cut.”

 

“Ah.”

 

They climb the steps out of the subway station and step out onto the sidewalk. No snow, today, but the air is cold and the sky overcast. Lim pulls her coat closer around her.

 

She squints up at Jae. “Sorry,” she says, feeling entirely lame. But she has to say something. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

 

Jae laughs a little, and gives an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders. “Studies show men have body image issues too, but we just can’t talk about it, because it might put a dent in the manly facade.”

 

“I know how men feel about their manly facades,” Lim says.

 

They walk in silence for a few minutes, winding through the streets with their faces bowed to avoid the wind. She glances up at him every block or so, to find him still oddly pensive, more closed off than she’s ever seen him before.

 

“You know,” she says finally, stopping a block away from their apartment to take a good look at him. “Looks aren’t everything.”

 

He laughs. “It’s okay. Really.”

 

She kicks at the pavement. Her feet are sore all over from her high heels. Really, she’s hardly one to talk.

 

“I used to have bulimia,” she tells him. “I guess it never goes away, actually. That feeling like—” Her eyes roam the streets, searching for an answer in the light reflecting off the window panes. “If you can just make yourself hurt a little bit, just a little bit, everything else will be okay because of that.”

 

He looks at her, waiting patiently for her to continue. She feels small under his gaze, fully aware that after all these years, she doesn’t have life figured out nearly so well as she pretends to.

 

“And I’d cut out all these pictures of what I wanted to look like,” she continues. “And go to the gym and just—whatever. I never looked like that. But I don’t think men and women are all that different, in that regard. It just might look a little different.”

 

“False dichotomy.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You okay, though?”

 

She nods, turning to start walking towards the apartment. She waits for him to fall in step beside her. “Yeah, now. Went through a lot of counseling. Formed new mental habits.” She sighs. “Takes a lot of work, though.”

 

“Maintaining good habits.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Jae nods. He waits while Lim pulls out her keys and opens up the door to the stairwell. She lets him go first, squeezing the guitar and her backpack awkwardly through the doorframe, then follows him up the stairs. He stops on his landing and nods to his door.

 

“You wanna come in? Seems only fair.”

 

She laughs, and follows him inside. He puts his keys on a hook, kicks off his shoes, and then enters the apartment, which is when she can finally see around him and get a good look inside. It’s cramped with all the belongings of five guys, but neatly arranged.

 

“Smells okay,” she teases. Last time Jaebum called her, last year or so, she’d visited his apartment and nearly keeled over from the combined scent of cat and sweat, compliments of his six roommates. That was a bigger apartment, though. This one should smell worse, if you were going by person-to-space ratio.

 

Jae grins at her. “Sungjin is a neat freak.”

 

“Why do you guys all live here, together?” Lim asks, sitting on the couch. It looks old, like maybe it came with the apartment.

 

“Well, my family is in California. You want something to drink?” He turns to the refrigerator and waits for her to nod. “We have water, and beer, but it’s—four PM, feels a little early to me honestly, so I can offer you water.”

 

“Water is fine.”

 

“Cool. So anyway, Sungjin and Dowoon are both from Busan, Brian’s family is in Canada, and Wonpil—well Wonpil’s complicated.”

 

“Is Wonpil the smiley one?”

 

“Yes.” Jae sinks down next to her on the couch and hands her a glass of water. “Recent dramatic break-up, weird stuff with his parents—not bad even, just really freaking bizarre—and so when we decided we wanted to really give the band a fair shot, we all ended up here.”

 

“It’s a little small.”

 

“Eh. Could be worse. At least the plumbing works.”

 

“Please don’t jinx it by talking about it.”

 

He laughs, big and loud. They sit for a moment, sipping on water. Outside the window, three birds flit on the electrical wire, little brown birds without a care in the world. Then one spooks, and they all fly off, black blots against the patch of gray sky.

 

“It’s good for me, though,” Jae says. He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I deal with anxiety a lot—like crazy bad.”

 

“A lot of people do, these days,” Lim agrees.

 

“I’m getting weird about social stuff,” Jae says. He gives her a look, something apologetic and hopeful. Maybe he hasn’t talked about this before—or maybe he has, but it means something that he’s sharing it with her. “The other night Wonpil made me go out with him and some of his friends. And it was like—fine. Good, even. Everyone was cool. Then I came home and cried.”

 

“Wow.”

 

“I know.” Jae laughs. “That’s when I was like, hold up a second here, this is not normal.”

 

“I mean, who decides what’s normal though—”

 

“I want my normal to be going out and meeting new people without having a panic attack about whether or not they hated me.”

 

He’s smiling, but Lim wishes she could reach out and hold him, if it wouldn’t be misconstrued. She settles for leaning forward and watching him, giving him the space to speak or not speak. He’s quiet for a moment, picking at his fingernails.

 

“So anyway,” he says. “Living here is good, for me. It drives me crazy that I’m never alone, but.”

 

“It’s good not to be alone.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

They lapse into silence again. Lim chose to be alone, for her part, when she moved into this apartment. Her roommates from before had terrible habits, made bad health choices, took her out late at night and made her feel like nothing would ever take the edge off her insecurities but a run of the coolest clubs. One night she passed out at an acquaintance's house and woke up to the sound of a stranger throwing up in the next room. That’s when she realized she was living someone else’s life, and maybe if she were that person this would be fun, but she’s not and it wasn’t. So here she is, back in school, living alone, hanging out with her odd neighbor and wondering about the shape her life is forming into.

 

“You’re always welcome here, Lim,” Jae says suddenly, drawing her back out of her thoughts.

 

“Thanks,” she says softly. Outside, the birds return to the wire, chirping some kind of evening song.

  
  
  


 

On Friday, she arrives home after classes to find a flyer taped to her door. _Cafe Lights, Friday Nights_ the text reads, followed by a set of photos, including one of her second floor neighbors. They’re playing at 7:00 PM, which would give her just enough time to nap and freshen up and get to the cafe before they play, if she wanted to go.

 

She looks at the flyer for a second, pushing into the paper with her thumb. Then she notices a scribble in the corner. _Hope to see you! - Jae_

 

She purses her lips. Might as well go.

 

This is how she finds herself at a large and trendy cafe—more of a performance venue, really—sipping on some sort of artisan coffee and trying not to look too alone. Everyone else milling around looks painfully cool, and even if Lim has carefully invested in her wardrobe and makeup and spent lots of time trying to look like someone’s idea of beautiful, she is pretty sure this isn’t her scene.

 

Before she can consider leaving, though, the band walks onto the stage.

 

She notices Sungjin first, leaning into the microphone with a lopsided grin. “Hello everyone,” he says, a slight rasp to his voice. Heads begin to pop up, turning to face the stage.

 

Next to him is Brian, pulling the strap of his bass over his shoulder. He notices Lim, maybe, and smiles, but she can’t tell under the stage lights if he’s smiling at her, or the crowd. The keyboardist—Wonpil, she reminds herself—leans back, bobbing his head to some unheard music, and the drummer looks like he’s talking to himself. Jae walks on last, and he _definitely_ sees her, because he waves and doesn’t stop until she waves back, then puts a guitar pick in his mouth and grins.

 

“We want to start off with a song called ‘You,’” Sungjin says. “Hope you all like it.”

 

The drummer—Dowoon, then—counts down, and then the music starts.

 

They’re even better than she ever realized from listening to their music coming up muffled through her floorboards. She feels the first song reverberating somewhere deep in her soul, and when Brian raps, she wishes (like every other girl in the venue) that he was looking at her.

 

Every song after that clenches her heart tighter and more painfully than the one before it. She commits them to memory as best she can, letting the lyrics float over and around her. She’s so fixated on the music that she forgets she came here alone until someone asks, in the vicinity of her right shoulder, “Mind if I take this chair?”

 

“Oh!” she jumps. She looks up into the face of a stranger. “Sure. I mean, no. I mean, go ahead.”

 

When she turns back, Jae is leaning into the mike, his eyes drifting around the room.

 

“We just wrote this next one,” he says. “I don’t know if any of you have ever gone through a break-up and then just sort of self-destructed? I see a few of y’all laughing. You know what I mean. This song is about that. It’s called ‘Talking To.’”

 

They start in. At the very first line, Lim takes in a sharp breath, like Jae’s singing has kicked the air right out of her chest. Something about the song worms its way into her head, and she can too easily imagine the Jae who eats fried chicken on her couch as the person in the song, lying in bed for days, unable to take the initiative to get up. Maybe their friendship was destiny. They’re a real pair, the two of them.

 

A few songs later their set finishes, and the guys all disappear into a back room while a group of three guys steps up and starts rapping. After a few minutes Jae appears in the far corner, and he weaves through the tables until he reaches Lim.

 

“You made it!” he whispers, grinning broadly. “What’d you think?”

 

“Amazing,” Lim whispers back, more than sincere. “You deserve a record deal like, yesterday.”

 

“Thank you, thank you,” Jae laughs, then turns as two of the other guys walk up. “By the way, this is Wonpil and Dowoon. Wonpil and Dowoon, this is Lim. Oh, and Sungjin.” He reaches around to grab the third one by the shoulders, who immediately shrugs away from him.

 

“Just letting you know, we really don’t understand why you’re friends with Jae,” Sungjin says with a broad smile. “You’re much cooler than him.”

 

“He makes me laugh,” Lim says, grinning. She glances at Jae and swears she sees a hint of pink rising in his cheeks.

 

“Gotta question your sense of humor,” Wonpil says. But it’s all in jest, and Lim can tell that the other three are all fond of Jae.

 

“You guys want drinks?” Sungjin asks.

 

“I want that smoothie with the little umbrella in it,” Dowoon answers. He, Sungjin, and Wonpil leave for the drinks counter, and Jae hops into the seat next to Lim, tilting a water bottle back and forth in his hands while bobbing his head to the music.

 

“Bang Chan saranghae!” Jae yells during a lull, earning laughter from the three guys on stage. He grins at Lim, then turns to see the progress of their drinks, but the others are still in line.

 

“Where’s your other band member?” Lim asks, trying to keep her voice neutral.

 

Jae extends his neck and looks around the the crowd. “Ah—over there,” he says, and points.

 

Lim follows the direction he’s pointing in until she spots Brian, several tables away. Her stomach drops when she sees him. He’s leaning close to some girl with a thin, pretty face and long black hair, and smiling. Even from her seat, Lim can tell that the girl keeps running her fingers through her hair just so that it will fall on Brian’s arm, and whatever he’s saying is making the girl laugh.

 

“Lim?” Jae asks.

 

Lim swivels back to look at him. Was she too obvious? Of course she was too obvious. She can tell by the look on Jae’s face that she never had to say anything for him to guess what was on her mind.

 

“If you like him,” Jae says, leaning in, “Go ahead and ask him out. He’s a textbook serial monogamist and he hasn’t been on a date in like, three months or something. He’s antsy to fall in love.”

 

Lim has to laugh at this description, even as she tries to quell the unsteady rhythm of her pulse.

 

“I don’t like him,” she says. “I don’t even know him, really.”

 

“I barely knew my last girlfriend when I asked her out,” Jae says. “Of course, that last song we played was about her, so—bad example, actually.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Not your fault,” Jae shrugs.

 

Lim pats him on the arm and shakes her head, trying to figure out how to explain. “It’s not him, really. I just find that if I have any interest in a guy, he’s bound to have a girlfriend or some big crush or some ex he’s never gotten over. . . In my whole life, I’ve never dated a guy who was actually in love with _me_.”

 

Jae’s brow furrows as he looks at her, but he doesn’t say anything, instead resting his chin against the top of his water bottle and waiting for her to continue.

 

“I guess it’s some kind of awful need to just watch it happen to me all over again. I’m never surprised that there’s another girl.”

 

Jae taps his fingers against his water bottle and sits back in his chair again, all without taking his eyes off her. “Lim,” he says. “I’m going to tell you something, as your friend, and not hitting on you at all, I swear to God.”

 

Lim resists the urge to roll her eyes. “Okay.”

 

“You deserve someone who will really cherish you,” he says. “Someone good. I don’t know who that is—maybe it’s Brian, maybe it’s not—but don’t sell yourself short.”

 

She meets his gaze, then immediately looks away again. She doesn’t like the feeling of someone looking at her with such earnest sincerity, like he really _sees_ her, as a whole and worthwhile person. Most people never look at each other like that.

 

“It’s not Brian,” she says. “Don’t worry. He’s just good-looking.”

 

“Eh.” Jae frowns. “If you say so. But if you guys get together, and he moves upstairs, then we only have _four_ guys living in my apartment, which would be way better.”

 

“What are you talking about?” Sungjin asks, appearing behind Jae and setting drinks down onto the table. He hands Lim a lemon water, an unexpected but appreciated gesture. “Four guys in our apartment?”

 

“When we kick Brian out and make him move in with Fourth Floor Auntie.”

 

Wonpil slides into the seat beside Lim. “Fourth Floor Auntie is in love with Brian,” he explains.

 

“We’re trying to figure out how to use this to our advantage,” Dowoon says.

 

“So far, the only solution we’ve got seems to be kicking Brian out,” Jae says.

 

Then Brian appears, squeezing himself between Sungjin and Dowoon. “You’re kicking me out?”

 

“Don’t worry,” Sungjin tells him. “Fourth Floor Auntie wants you so bad, you’ll have a sugar momma in no time.” He says _sugar momma_ in English.

 

“I’ll have a _what?_ ” Brian gives him a look. Jae turns to explain English slang to Sungjin, and Brian grins at Lim and blinks. “I apologize for everything they said when I wasn’t here to supervise.”

 

“They’re fine,” Lim laughs. “Or maybe I really do have a weird sense of humor.”

 

“Probably the second one,” Brian returns.

 

“So what’s a sugar momma?” Dowoon asks. Jae heaves a sigh, and turns to explain, again.

  
  
  


 

And just like that, Lim has a group of friends. She’s never been “one of the guys,” before, whatever that means, and she’s not really sure she is now, either. They’re just—friends. Without realizing anything is happening, she ends up spending most evenings in their apartment or inviting them up to hers. They teach her how to play LoL, and she tries (and fails) to teach Dowoon taekwondo. Sometimes they invite other friends over, and at some point she discovers Wonpil is Jinyoung’s high school best friend, often mentioned but never seen. Another time, she invites Sunmi over, and laughs at the guys trying to hide their newfound crushes. It’s nothing new; everyone in the world has a crush on Sunmi.

 

Even though it’s the dead of winter, Lim’s apartment feels sunnier and warmer than it has in a long time. She tries not to get too used to the sight of Jae and one or two of the others stretched out on her couch, because she knows this isn’t going to last forever. Nothing this good lasts forever.

 

But it’s good. It’s as good as anything has been in a very long time. She holds onto that.

  
  
  


 

The electricity goes out at 6:15 PM, after Lim has come home and crashed but before she even has a chance to decide what she’s going to cook. At least the floor is still warm, and her candles are all arranged in perfect locations around the room.

 

Ten minutes later, someone knocks on her door. She opens it to find Jae with his cellphone in one hand, and a flyer in the other.

 

“We’re ordering takeout,” he says. “You want anything?”

 

“Sure,” she says, smiling to herself.

 

She takes the flyer, then invites him in, and he flops onto her couch as if it’s his own living room, pulling a blanket out of the basket without even glancing over to see where it is. Lim sits next to him and surveys the flyer by the flashlight of her phone, which she wisely charged at school, this time.

 

Jae texts their orders to the group chat and then they sit in companionable silence in the glow of candlelight and the pink evening sunlight streaming through the window. Her life looks so different than it did a month or so ago, and Lim smiles to herself, thinking about how nice it is to have a friend with her when the electricity goes out.

 

“Lim?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Thanks for being my friend.”

 

Lim gives Jae a look, unsure whether she should make fun of him or respond in kind. In the end she chooses the second one. “Thanks for being my friend, Jae.”

 

“I’m serious.” He leans back farther into the couch, his legs stretched out far in front of him, and looks at her. “I can talk to you about things I can’t really talk to anyone else about. And you really listen.”

 

Lim rests her elbow on the back of the couch and her head against her hand. “Same. We went from saying hello to heart-to-hearts really fast.”

 

“But not in a weird way.”

 

“A little bit weird. Just not in a bad way.”

 

“Fair.”

 

Another few moments of silence. Lim wonders where they’ll be next year, in five years, in ten. It’s hard to say whether this will be one of her friendships that lasts the rest of her life, or a companion for just a brief stretch of time. Both are good. She’s glad he’s here, now.

 

He looks over at her again. “I wrote a song. About our friendship.”

 

Now Lim has to laugh. “Really? Why?”

 

“Because it’s beautiful and meaningful, that’s why. Hang on a sec, I’m going to go get my guitar. Wait, then the guys will come up and that’ll be weird.”

 

“You don’t always write your friends songs about your friendships?”

 

“Not usually,” Jae laughs.

 

“I’ve got a ukulele.”

 

“I can work with that.”

 

So Lim goes and retrieves her ukulele, and then Jae plays her the song. The lyrics involve a lot of puns about their apartment, a lengthy lament about how cold the building is without electricity, and a _Toy Story_ reference, but the line that catches her goes _seems like life ain’t out to get me, when I’m next to you._

 

Just as he finishes, the electricity comes back on, humming to life around them. They look at each other and start laughing, long and loud, throwing off the weight of the world with every breath.

 

 

 

 

_end._


End file.
